


Cowardly Lions

by cherrytart



Series: Burglarising [5]
Category: The Hobbit (2012), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: AU, I Tried, Other, also other stuff, bagginshield, fem!Bilbo, in which i decide lobelia is a red head based on no evidence whatsoever, its late and i'm tired, its long and there is dialogue, slowly expanding series, well sort of, wow i really do need to work on my tagging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-26
Updated: 2013-01-26
Packaged: 2017-11-26 22:09:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherrytart/pseuds/cherrytart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A burglar is accosted on her way home and finds herself in a very sticky situation. Her relatives aren't exactly helping.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cowardly Lions

**Author's Note:**

> Here's part four. Now, I honestly never expected Burglarising to go this far, or to have so many lovely people reading it and inspiring me to write more. seriously, you are all amazing.  
> Oh, and asparklethatisblue on tumblr has made fanart for parts three and four of this series and basically deserves all of the awards. Art is on my tumblr and theirs. I would link, but once again it's late and I'm lazy.   
> Now please do have at it.

Autumn has come to Shire, and with it the restoration of Billa’s peace of mind. It has been months since she has seen a trace of a dwarf (or at least one that she knows) in Hobbiton and Freya seems to have forgotten all about the incident on the road back from Buckland.

 _You’re a coward, Billa Baggins._ She reflects ruefully as she hefts her string bag higher up one arm and continues her plodding way across the green. _A coward, and a good one at that._

The bundle she is holding in her other arm- namely, her daughter, wrapped up snugly in wool and mittens, gives a sleepy sniff and nestles closer to her mother. Freya is getting too big to be carried like this, Billa reflects, but her little girl’s feet are not so hardy as most hobbit children.

Cobblers are few and far between in the Shire, what with the lack of demand and all, and Billa fancies she’ll have to make a trip to Bree and see about getting Freya some shoes made before long. That’ll be sure to draw plenty of stares and tutting.

In the end though, it’s just another thing that marks Freya apart from the other shirelings, like her ears and her nose and the beard that Billa is sure will grow in as soon as she reaches her tweens. Billa wonders sometimes if, long ago, dwarves and hobbits coupling was common.

Obviously it is _possible_ , Freya is living proof of that, and there are always rumours…tales for wayward girls about the perils of trusting a dwarf with ones virtue. They never end happily, and well, Billa can see why- _now_.

 _Save me from the stubbornness of dwarves._ Gandalf had often muttered on their erstwhile adventure, and maybe Billa would have been wise to listen. In reality, though, she had been helpless when faced with her own adoration that had seemed to spring up from somewhere deep inside her, as though the King Under the Mountain had taken a pick-axe to her and split her apart before welding half her soul to his.

A bad and messy way to think about it, true, but the closest way she can reconcile her desires to anything resembling common sense.

_Something I tricked myself into thinking I possessed in abundance._

Before she left the Shire with the company, Billa had done an admirable job at making herself a well-to-do gentlehobbit lady, as befitted a Baggins of Bag End. She had always felt her father would have been proud of her, and found herself wishing he could know her as she had become, rather than the rush of a lass she’d been in her tweens.

Now, though- well, perhaps Billa should be glad they laid Da to rest when they did. Not that he would ever shun her, or speak against her no matter how many dwarves she had lain with (and Billa knows it is whispered to be more than a few)- but Bungo would have been ashamed on her account, and saddened at her degradation in the eyes of others, and that she couldn’t have borne.

It would be different with Ma, she knows that as well. Belladonna’s last years had been troubled- she grew weak and weary in the absence of her beloved husband. In her last hours, it was not the adventures of her youth she had spoken of, the tales Billa had so loved when she was older, but little things about Papa- presents she gave him, meals he cooked her, the flower cart that had tipped over in the middle of the road on their wedding day, showering them both in fluffy white blossoms- an unexpected blessing on this strange match,  the widows had been heard to whisper.

 _What would you think of me now Ma?_ Billa wonders as she turns into Bagshot Row- she’s come the long way round out of pure habit, and darkness is beginning to fall. _Would you draw me close and kiss my cheeks to comfort me as you did when I was small, as I do for Freya now when she comes to me with sore throat or a scrape on her knee?_

The more she thinks about it, the less sure Billa feels about trying to guess Belladonna Took’s thoughts. She knows that when she raced out of her door that long ago morning, it had been as though Ma had been urging her on, her Tookish blood whispering of that sweet far yearning for things unseen, friends unmet, secrets yet to be discovered.

But even though she is certain her mother would have approved of Thorin, of anyone Billa loved enough to give herself to without reservations- what her reaction would be to her secret, Billa does not know. Oh, her mother would have adored Freya just as she herself does, but what would she think of Billa for denying her lover his child?

If she were not so weighted down with shopping and sleepy toddler, Billa would shrug her shoulders as if in defiance of these thoughts. She has done what she has to, what she thought right, so many times over that she grows weary of agonising over the should ofs and the could haves and the might have beens.

She looks up ahead of her instead, nearly home now, and resists the urge to do a double- nay, _triple_ take at what she sees.

Or rather, who appears, right in front of her, blocking her progress towards her front door with the upward swing of a sharply spoked umbrella, which comes across her chest like a  thump with a  mace and almost knocks her backwards.

Freya stirs, mumbling, but the umbrella has the effect it’s owner wants, that of stopping the owner of Bag-end in her tracks. “Billa, you’re back.” the woman says, her voice hovering somewhere between vindication and irritation.

“Hello Lobelia.” Billa replies, striving for politeness and suspecting that she hasn’t quite achieved it. “Lovely evening.” she continues, when Lobelia fixes her with that beady, brown eyed stare, disapproval oozing from her very posture.

“Is it, indeed?” Lobelia asks in a shockingly (for her) quiet voice, not even hesitating by a blink. Billa decides right then that she has no time for this and attempts to push past Otho’s wife, only to find the umbrella wedged into  the strap of her shopping bag and Lobelia hissing in her face like a disgruntled grass snake.

“Would you let me pass, cousin?” Billa asks stonily, hoping against hope that Freya will not wake and start crying as she is apt to do when one of the Sackville Bagginses is around.

“You can’t go in there.” Lobelia insists, and to Billa’s shock, the other woman reaches out to grip her arm, keeping her from entering Bag-end’s front gate.

“Why on earth not? Has your family moved in again whilst I was out at market?” Billa knows she is both glaring and being louder than is necessary, but it has been a long day and Lobelia’s ridiculousness is not helping her mood. She remembers the ruckus when she turned the Sackville Bagginses out of her house the last time, and tries not to look too pleased with herself.

Lobelia gives a contemptuous tut, accompanied by a toss of her coppery ringlets and a haughty sniff. When Billa doesn’t respond, she puffs up as though possessed by the fledging spirit of an ill-tempered porcupine. “You, Billa, ought to be embarrassed for yourself.”

Rather than countering with the obvious (and appropriate) ‘well so should you’, Billa sighs and attempts to distangle herself from the knot of scarf and keys and Freya and shopping bag and umbrella and Lobelia’s unyielding grip that she’s somehow found herself in.

Lobelia, meanwhile, is in full flow. “Running around with ingrate dwarves, whelping illegitimate children, coming back here acting as though you’re a cut above the rest of us, you with your…your downright innappropriate…. shenanigans!”

“Shenanagins?” Billa has to repeat that, because Lobelia’s endowment does not extend liberally to her brain and she finds herself wondering whether the other woman is expressing herself quite as she means to.

“Yes, _shenanigans_ \- oh now, leave off with your pulling!” Lobelia yanks Billa back as she attempts to get past her once again.

“Lobelia, it’s getting late and I’m very tired, what on earth do you want?” Billa wrests her arm back, just about out of patience.

“I am trying, oh dear cousin, to _help_ you.” The words hang in the air as if fully aware of their own unlikely existence, waiting to be explained.

“Wha-why? Help me how?” Finding herself stuttering slightly from confusion, Billa frowns at Lobelia in the murky shire dusk.

Lobelia sniffs again, glancing this way and that as though checking for unwanted observers, before jerking Billa towards her and whispering: “There is somebody in your house.”

“What?” Billa asks again, dissatisfied with this new limit to her vocabulary but unable to articulate anything further.

“Well, I say your house, though what business you have living here bold as brass rather than taking yourself and your…offspring off somewhere out of the way as would any reasonable person I don’t know, and-”

“Yes alright Lobelia, I know all this. You don’t like me and I don’t like you and I ask you again, what is going on?”  Billa waves aside Lobelia’s oft repeated lament against her reclamation of Bag-end, and her own carefully bottled anger at the slight.

“I _told_ you, there is someone in there.” Lobelia grits out, and Billa looks up toward her house. It seems deserted, there are no lights in the windows she can see, and yet…

“How did you work that out, then?” She asks Lobelia, receiving another long suffering look in return.

“Well did _you_ leave the door ajar?” Lobelia gestures towards the round entrance to Bag-end, and, irritating habit of answering questions with a question (which is of course what makes Lobelia such an excellent gossip) aside, Billa’s feels her skin turn to gooseflesh when she sees that Lobelia is right- the dark green door has been pushed to from the inside, but it has very clearly been opened, and recently.

Billa gulps. “You should go home.” she tells Lobelia, before entering her garden through the gate, holding tightly onto Freya. _It’ll be Gandalf._ She tells herself. _Just like him, dropping by unannounced at the most innappropriate time._ But that does nothing to still the frantic beating of her heart.

She realises that, rather than leaving, Lobelia is instead bringing up the rear, holding her umbrella aloft in a way strangely reminiscent of Ori and his little slingshot. Or perhaps that is just Billa’s own addled mind tricking her. “I said to go.” She mutters when they get to the door, and she can see now that the lock has been picked, _expertly_ , and can’t help but wonder if Nori has returned for whatever reason.

“Pish.” Lobelia replies. “Are you going on in or should I-”

Billa sighs, resists the temptation to role her eyes and steps into Bag-end, and since Lobelia Sackville Baggins is many many things but most definitely does not lack for bravery, she follows. There is precious little light inside, the oil lamp on the low table burned almost out.

Billa looks around- no, nobody there. Lobelia must be mistaken, and she would happily believe that if not for the rigid feeling in her own spine that speaks of something she cannot see or hear yet, but knows is here, like she knows herself.

And then she smells it- pipe weed.

Not long bottom leaf or any kind of old toby, but the sweeter, fumier kind dwarves are apt to use.

 _Nori, if this is you then you better have a very good explanation, very fast._ And if it’s not…Billa finds herself wanting to fetch her magic ring, bolt out the door and run all the way to the Buckleberry ferry and go somewhere far away, and not let go of her daughter until she gets there.

Freya sleeps, warm and small and vulnerable, her head nuzzled into her mother’s shoulder and her small hands gripping Billa’s scarf. The smell is coming from the kitchen, and though there is no light, Billa fancies she’d see smoke if her eyes were better.

Lobelia clearly smells it as well, because she wafts her free hand in front of her face. “What on earth is that?” she wrinkles her nose as she speaks, thankfully still in a whisper.

“Here.” Billa says, thrusting her shopping bag into Lobelia’s arms- she had thought to pass over her daughter, but reconsiders almost immediately. Lobelia has the tendency to look at Freya as though she is something vaguely unsettling and extremely distasteful, and probably would voice those thoughts if she did not have a healthy care for her limbs.

Anyway, Lobelia huffs and drops the bag into onto Mama’s glory box, taking up her umbrella again. “Wait here.” Billa says, stealing quickly along the corridor and into her own bedroom, settling Freya on her bed in a nest of pillows and a fluffy eiderdown. Her little girl squirms and curls up her hands into fists, but stays still, burrowing into the warmth as Kili used to do whenever his bedroll wound up too far from the fire.

Billa breathes out at last, kissing Freya on the head before stealing out of the room, closing the door behind her and going back to Lobelia, who she is unsurprised to notice is fiddling with a small silver ornament on the windowsill.

“Now?” Billa asks her, when Lobelia notices she is being watched and furrows her red brows as though she is the one suffering a home invasion. “Really?”

Lobelia drops the ornament back into place with a damning clank, and if whoever is waiting in the kitchen didn’t know they were in the house yet, - well, they certainly do now.

Biting her lip, Billa picks up the failing oil lamp, advancing towards the kitchen door with Lobelia on her heels.

Once she pushes the door open and her eyes adjust to the murk, what she sees almost makes her wish she had let Otho and Lobelia have the hobbit-hole as theirs three years ago. Then they would be the ones to deal with the dwarf who is sitting proprietorially at her hearthside, looking every inch something out of a bedtime story.

_and take care my dear, for dwarves are lustful creatures, and they like nothing better than to carry hobbit lasses away as their brides_

He turns in her direction, and she supposes he might be smiling, not that she could tell- he is shrouded in cloak and hood, face covered by shadow, and she cannot even see his eyes.

“Billa.” He says, though, and against her own will she sighs, for his voice is the same as ever, warm and almost laughing, not quite a mockery. “Been waiting for you since…”

“No.” Billa gets her voice back as she crosses to the other side of the kitchen to light the other lamps, throwing herself and Lobelia into some relief. The dwarf, frustratingly, remains hidden in the folds of his clothes and the darkness blotting where he sits. She sees his shape, the sparks and smoke from his pipe, and nothing more.

Yet she knows him as well as any other. “Fili, _no_.” she repeats. “You can’t be here.”

“Why’s that then?” he asks, and for a moment she thinks he might get up, stride over to her as he did the first time he entered her house, whether to dump a stack of swords in her arms with a cheeky wink or to pull her against his chest in a hug.

If he was going to though, he is soon put off by Lobelia, who manoeuvres herself between him and Billa, brandishing her umbrella as though she means to poke him with it, to keep him at bay. “Now see here you…you…dwarf…”

“ _Dwarf_?” And then Fili is laughing, a deep smoky chortle that works against Billa’s own will to make her relax. “Not one of your smarter cousins, is this then, Billa?” his head turns in her direction, and now she can see the glitter of one of his eyes (blue grey, dark and shaded, like his uncle but not so fierce nor hard), but that’s all.

“Fili.” She protests weakly, but she feels as though her strength is draining out of her. She is so very tired and so very scared and relieved and she longs for something she can’t quite place.

“I missed you. We all did.” He takes another puff on his pipe and Billa’s heart constricts slowly. She can’t think of even a word to say, other than _what are you doing here_ and that by itself is uncomfortable and needless enough.

Lobelia, though, more than makes up for Billa’s reticence. “Now then!” She snaps, drawing herself up to her not-so-considerable fullest height and glaring around the room. “I don’t know what exactly is going on, but I know that I’ll be going directly to my husband if you don’t state your business this instant, sir.”

“Oh, will you now?” Fili shifts  forward a little in his seat and Lobelia gives a jab in his direction with her umbrella. If Billa felt so inclined, she might tell the woman that she is being japed with, but it is all she can do not to run from the room and barricade herself in with Freya until everyone goes away and leaves them alone.

So she stays silent, and Lobelia fires up yet again, seeming to have taken on an 'if you can't beat them, join them' frame of mind with regards to the fix  Billa is currently in. “Indeed I will, master dwarf. You are breaking and entering and you should be reported for it. And don’t you propose to try and stop me.” She says tartly.

“Ooh I wouldn’t dare.” Fili puts his pipe down and smooth’s his hands down his thighs, leaning back nonchalantly in the low chair. “And who might I ask is your husband?”

Lobelia tosses her hair. “My husband- ” she begins, and Billa flinches at the encroaching shrillness, “-is the eminent Otho Sackville-Baggins, and I think you shall find he takes exception to the besmircher of his cousin’s honour pitching up here without so much as a by your leave and causing further disgrace to  what was once a respectable and proper family name, and for that matter-”

“Lobelia, stop.” Billa begs, for Fili is making a spluttering noise and she can feel a headache coming on if this continues much longer. “Fili didn’t besmirch anything.”

“ Oh didn’t he?” Lobelia asks, plainly not believing a word of it. “How can you be sure of that, if you will go running off with thirteen dwarves and come back with an illegitimate chil-”

“ _Lobelia_!” Billa half shouts, her hands flying to her head in fear and shock as Fili sits forwards again, and she can feel her life crashing down around her ears, and there is naught she can do to stop it because of stupid Lobelia Bracegirdle and her big fat mouth. She feels a helpless tween, playing almost at being a woman grown. 

“What did she just say?” Fili asks, and any trace of humour is gone from his voice. The room seems very cold.

“Fili.” Billa crosses the room and kneels down in front of him, fisting her hands on the arms of his chair. “There is nothing for you here. Please, if you hold any regard for me at all, go back to Erebor… go back to your king.”

“I hold more than regard for you, burglar.” He uses Thorin’s special name for her and he knows exactly what he’s doing and for a moment she wants to wrench his hood down and slap him for it. “I love you, we all do. Thorin most of all-”

“ **No**.” Billa fights the temptation to stuff her fist into her mouth and scream. “Do not say these things, you have no right, no right, not here not now not ever.” She will not hear it, cannot bear to. Not that.

“As much right as you have to lie to me?” Fili asks, his fingers under her chin, trying to make her look at him, but her eyes are glazed with pointless frustrating tears and she cannot make him out. “I heard what she said, Billa. I’ll ask you just once if it’s true.”

And oh, how she forgets, he is truly a prince now, pure and hard as stone, prince of the kingdom under the lonely mountain, beholden to his king, to _Thorin_ ; and to their people as never before.

“You can ask, Fili son of Dis, but I do not have to answer.” Billa says determinedly, trying to fix him with a glare but finding it difficult to do so when she doesn’t have anything to glare at.

Behind them, Lobelia loses her grip on her sudden and astonishing ability to keep quiet. “Oh for heaven’s sake, Billa, why not just…”

“Lobelia, don’t you have somewhere to be…?” Billa asks hopefully, looking back at the red headed woman, whose brows are narrowed in a mixture of disapproval and fascination.

“Oh, to be sure. Well, as long as I’m here I’ll be having a little something to eat.” Lobelia affects a light tone and complete misunderstanding of the request and crosses to the pantry.

“She was not lying.” Fili says, and Billa finally blinks away her tears, proud of herself for not having shed a one. “You bore my uncles child. I suspected as much when I looked around earlier…”

“You did _what_?” Affronted, Billa attempts to stand up, but Fili has a grip on her wrists and draws them into his lap. “This is my home, you insufferable clot.” She says grumpily, feeling much as she did when he and his brother (and oh how she longs for Kili who would make this all so different) first barged into her little house.

“And what’s yours is ours.” Fili says simply. “We’re kin, bound by blood if it’s really true what your cousin says. How could you, though...”

“Stop.” Billa makes a foolhardy attempt to wrench her hands away, but his hold is strong, his own hands warm and hard around her wrists. “How could _I_?”

“Well, that is what we’ve all been wondering…” comes a snide voice from the pantry.

“ _Not_ helping, Lobelia.” Billa grits out.  “And you! you have no right, Fili, no right at all to judge me when you sit there and won’t even look me in the eye!” She is aware of the raised pitch of her voice, but when everything is coming apart as it is that is at the very bottom of her concern list.

“You want…oh, Billa.” Fili seems to slump slightly, and then he takes his hands away from hers. Reaching up, to push his hood back.

Suddenly, it seems that there is too much light in the room, and Billa realises why, when Kili came to the Shire earlier in the year and she spied him whilst hiding behind the Green Dragon, he bore not a scratch on his face despite the reports of both the heirs of Durin being injured in a certain cursed battle.

The thick, dark scar reaches from under Fili’s hairline, bisects his cheek before breaking off in a spiderweb of lacerated flesh down his neck and under his clothes. Where the axe must have hit, his eye is empty and reddened, a startling dried out husk. And when he makes an attempt to ease her with a small smile, the exposed muscle in his neck and jaw writhes, splitting red and angry.

“Oh, Fili…” Billa’s own voice breaks and falls away, because she cannot fathom what is in front of her and how it came to be. How it is all. her. fault.

“S’not so bad, Billa. If Ori hadn’t hit the orc that was coming for me with that funny little slingshot of his my head would’ve been clean off.” He smiles again as though the memory is pleasant, though his voice is hollow with something that sounds like guilt at his own maiming.

Billa is so taken up with wondering where to look and what to say that she doesn’t hear the creak of the kitchen door, and light footsteps behind her that are certainly not Lobelia’s. Not until Freya comes up beside her and lifts her head to stare at Fili, childish and unabashed.

“You got a boo-boo.” her daughter informs the heir to the throne under the mountain with childish candour, pointing up towards his face. Fili seems as frozen as Billa, staring at this small feminine doppelganger of his uncle. It must be disconcerting for him, Billa imagines, her thoughts running strangely out of sync with things around her.

“I s’pose I do, right enough.” Fili says hoarsely, reaching out as if to touch Freya’s cheek, and Billa hears it more clearly this time- he is not ashamed of his scars, no true dwarf would be, but he is guilty for them, for he is supposed to be strong and brave and without marks, this tattered mountain lion with his golden mane and flashing knives and sharp, white smile.

“Mama fix?” Freya asks hopefully, looking between her immobile mother and Fili. She tugs at Fili’s trousers upon receiving no response, and obligingly he lifts her to his lap has he must have lifted Kili when they were still but dwarflings in Ered Luin. It is then, seeing her daughter settled gently against Fili’s chest, blue eyes bright with interest and the kind of easy trust that can only come in children, that Billa catches up with what is happening.

What she _cannot **prevent**_ from happening.

“I don’t think so, my love.” Billa says gently, meeting her daughters eyes. She doesn’t know what to do. Fili’s presence, his scars and Freya’s immediate acceptance has placed Billa Baggins beyond any kind of reasonable comprehension.

“S’not bedtime.” Freya protests, mistaking Billa’s harrowed face for a rebuke. “S’not.” she leans up as if to assure Fili- her cousin, they are cousins- of this.

“No?” he asks, face breaking into a reluctant grin.

“No, I suppose it’s not.” Billa agrees. She can think of naught else to say.

“Well.” Lobelia is standing in the pantry doorway, arms akimbo and munching on an apple. “There’s the cat put among the pigeons and no mistake.”

And Billa, finally releasing the groan that has been threatening her since earlier, buries her head in her hands, only coming back up once she has summoned the determination to deal with her cousin’s wife.

“I have a guest, Lobelia, as you can see.” She begins, and Lobelia nods in a way that might have been conciliatory, had Billa not known her better.

“My apologies, master dwarf.” Lobelia tilts her head to one side. “Would you like an apple? They’re most excellent.” She holds out a red and yellow specimen towards him.

Fili makes a small, whimpering sound. 

**Author's Note:**

> For people who haven't read the book, at one point Fili gets trapped in a barrel with apples and swears he will never eat another one. So that was my attempt at a joke. Of sorts. :)


End file.
